Nitra Gallery at Art Athina 2014 (15-18 May)

Nitra Gallery at Art Athina 2014 (15-18 May)

Thodoris Zafeiropoulos | Irene Kana | Alexia Xafopoulou

Nitra Art Gallery presents three artists who transform the presentation of reality into a surreal version of it by using extraordinary staging and tools such as the technique, the colour and the material.

Thodoris Zafeiropoulos processed 148 digital photography records from his personal archive. The images as a total record the region of Mildred’s Lane of the USA where for the last decades the artist Mark Dion has produced a series of works that explore the notion of archive. Zafeiropoulos’s landscape was composed from the beginning from fragments of archival material, making the final form of it completely artificial. A result that was achieved through the use of the archive and delivered through high technology (laser engraving) onto natural raw material.

If Zafeiropoulos stages the natural scenery, Alexia Xafopouloou stages the urban landscape. The main instruments that hold a distinctive role in her work are the colour and the substance, as well as the use of thread, which is a structural element of the canvas. Xafopoulou transfers facets of the city and using these images as raw material, she twists them. She removes and at the same time brings out different elements transforming the original image into something new, fragmentary and uncanny where the human element is evident only through its absence.

Irene Kana brings back that human element in its most tender form, through the portraits of young girls. However the dimension of her work surpasses reality. Through the bold colour, the expressionist touch and the use of components like ribbons and birds, an element of explosive power is highlighted through an apparently innocent presence. Kana studies human beings and conveys heterogeneous sides of their soul into the surface of the canvas.

At the same time, Nitra Gallery is hosting in its physical space in Thessaloniki, the exhibition by the Bulgarian photographer Vesselina Nikolaeva “Yesterday When I was little”, which is part of the parallel programm of the Photobiennale organized by the Museum of Photography.